The Library has recently carried out a series of innovations that provide a much wider range of research resources in heritage conservation. Some resources are accessible to our Rome-based Library visitors, while others are available to all our virtual users, no matter where they are in the world.
We have just upgraded to a new version of the Library Catalogue, which features an attractive new design and a New Acquisitions link. In addition to providing a search screen for the ICCROM Library holdings, the catalogue interface links to online resources, both conservation-related and of general interest to the field, that give access to hundreds of thousands of online documents.
These links include the popular Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), the UNESDOC portal, the Europeana portal of digitized European heritage, ICOMOS Open Archive with over 1000 documents, the Getty Research Portal with over 100 000 scanned titles, OpenDOAR which links to over 3000 academic Open Access repositories, and many more. Access to multilingual texts is ensured through sites such as the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) with its bilingual English-French resources, HAL Archives Ouvertes and OCIM with their resources in French, ILAM Docs with its resources in Spanish, DAR at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt with full-text resources in Arabic, and much more. We invite you to explore!
The ICCROM Library is pleased to announce that it now offers online periodical literature through the EZB platform (Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek, or Electronic Periodicals Library) in partnership with the Universität Regensburg, Germany. This shared portal provides a window to a vast array of electronic journals, many of them Open Access, licensed by over 600 academic libraries.
The Open Access journals may be accessed by clicking on the EZB icon at the ICCROM Library Catalogue page, and viewed by anyone around the world. EZB also provides a portal for ICCROM’s paid online subscriptions, which for copyright reasons may only be accessed at ICCROM’s premises.
For those intending to carry out research in Rome, the ICCROM Library has also partnered with the URBiS network of foreign academies in Rome. ICCROM’s bibliographic records are pooled on a single search platform with fourteen other international libraries, including the American Academy of Rome, the British School at Rome, the Ecole française de Rome, the German Archaeological and Historical Institutes, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and others. By clicking on the URBiS icon on the ICCROM Library Catalogue page, users in Rome can review all holdings in these libraries, and so locate the best facility for their research.
At the same time, the ICCROM Library remains committed to its participation in the BCIN network of worldwide conservation libraries. It will soon complete a new upload of ca. 10 000 recent bibliographic records to that shared catalogue. BCIN continues to be a heavily used research tool for the conservation profession.
We welcome you to make use of these tools to stimulate and enrich your cultural heritage research. Please feel free to share any feedback that might help us improve our services.